# Quick Start Guide, Obtain & Manage Informed Consent With this online quick start guide to Participant Kit, you can create, obtain and manage informed consent - as well as streamlining your administration efficiency. Source: https://participantkit.com/help/quick-start Welcome to Participant Kit! With this tool, you can create, obtain and manage informed consent - spending less time on administration and more time doing great research. Before starting out, it's important to know three things: 1. Everything in the consent template is editable. 2. We send emails from Participant Kit to create an audit trail - the email itself will appear to come from whoever sent it, so any replies go to you and not us 3. When you link research recordings to your signed consent, we do not have any access to them - we use the links to remind you to delete them, generate reports for data access requests or withdraw participants from research. Let's get the ball rolling! In this quick start guide we'll show you around the app and get you up and running in 6 easy steps. ## Step 1. Configure your account Your first goal is to get Participant Kit ready for use by yourself or the rest of your research team. You might want to add some additional protections to your account too. - [Brand your consent forms](https://participantkit.com/help/brand-consent-forms) - [Set your data retention policy](https://participantkit.com/help/set-data-retention)
100% of researchers said they care about keeping participant data safe. Join them by enabling 2 factor authentication.
## Step 2. Create a test project Let's dive in so you can get an idea of how Participant Kit works in the day to day. Here we'll walk through how to set up a project, create a consent form, use it to ask for consent and checking to see who has signed and what they agreed to. - Watch a quick walk-through (video - 6:33 mins) - Read the help docs: [Create a project](https://participantkit.com/help/create-a-project)
Using fake email addresses will damage your organisation's sending reputation and might mean your consent forms end up in people's spam folder.
## Step 3. Create your own consent template (optional) So now you've got first-hand experience of how it works - let's get our teeth into something a little more complicated… Creating your own consent template. This is the hardest thing to do in Participant Kit, but once it's done your entire organisation can reuse it over and over again. Or you can skip it and just use ours! - [How Consent Templates work](https://participantkit.com/help/how-org-templates-work) - [What is Liquid?](https://participantkit.com/help/what-is-liquid) - [Template cheat sheet](https://participantkit.com/help/template-cheat-sheet)
Knowing what you need to include in a consent form can be quite a daunting task. We created a checklist to walk you through the process.
## Step 4. Invite your team Research is a team sport! Our role based permissions enable you to quickly and easily define who can do what when you're adding and removing people from projects. Enable your researchers to work with recruiters and enable collaborators (the client, product team or third parties) to take part in your research without disclosing sensitive information or losing control of your participants. - [See how roles and permissions work](https://participantkit.com/help/roles-permissions) - [Invite your team](https://participantkit.com/help/invite-your-team)
All responsibilities (notifications of participants changing their mind, withdrawing or requesting information etc) will be automatically redirected to whoever is the current Project Owner.
## Step 5. Link recordings to consent A big part of compliance is keeping track of what happens to a person's data after they have given you permission to use it. This makes things like access requests pretty straightforward when you have to deal with them in the future. - See how to link recordings to consent (video - 30 seconds) We don't have access to the recording at all. We only use the link for two things: to send you reminders to delete, and for generating reports for data access requests.
Linking recordings to consent adds to the audit trail for each participant. If someone wants to withdraw or request their information, you can search for them in All Projects, quickly and easily generate a report of their record or initiate the withdrawal process.
## Step 6. Keep an eye on things Org Owners get to see all activity across your organisation. If you're an Org Owner, you'll see an "All Projects" option in top menu. From All Projects, you can: - See how many participants have given consent - See how many recordings have been linked to those consent forms - Handle data access requests - Initiate withdrawing participants from projects